Like their predecessor Monosteel pistons, Federal-Mogul’s new Magnum Monosteel
pistons utilize Federal-Mogul’s patented dual friction-welded construction. The friction
welding technique enables the creation of large cooling galleries, which are designed
to provide enhanced temperature resistance and strength, as well as the capacity to
withstand higher cylinder pressures.
be able to cool down the piston has
very tangible benefits in terms of effi-
ciency and longevity.”
A specific enhancement to the
second-generation Magnum piston is
a double-band piston skirt design,
which the company called a first for
modern diesel pistons. The double-
band skirt is engineered to reduce
frictional drag and decreases the
overall piston skirt area by 40% over
conventional pistons, thereby lessen-
ing overall mass. Friction is reduced
by as much as 17% over conventional
steel pistons, the company said.
“A piston is essentially a ring carrier,” said Westbrooke. “It needs to be
cool and stable. The skirt, the length
of the skirt, the geometry and the
clearance of the skirt are critical to
providing a stable system.
“When we started thinking about
the Magnum, the skirt becomes one
of the problems. We’re looking for
things that are lighter, have less drag,
with better performance to allow better fuel economy. A stable, tight-fitting
skirt is also a skirt that generates
quite a bit of sliding friction.
“It’s the classic dichotomy — what’s
good for one thing is bad for some-
thing else.”
While the most obvious and conven-
tional way to deal with that dichotomy
would have been to increase skirt
clearance, that solution raised other
problems such as a reduction in stabil-
ity and a potential increase in noise
generated from piston slap. “Noise is
coming into the equation more and
more around the world as we speak,”
Westbrooke said. “That was one of the
obvious reasons we didn’t want to go
there, though it is a cheap and quick
solution to the friction problem.”
Instead, Federal-Mogul developed
its double-band skirt configuration,
which “essentially and in very simple
terms is a Monosteel skirt with a big
window cut out of it,” Westbrooke
said. “Anytime you cut on a diameter,
you can factor a pi benefit, which in
this case means mass reductions up
to around 7% when compared to its
Monosteel predecessor.
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